The Norman Rockwell Restaurants are coming. In fact, almost here. The first is due to open in Stony Brook, Long Island in January. Restaurateur Bill Sukow plans to open eight to ten Rockwell-themed restaurants in the next five years, with at least four of them located on Long Island. Sukow, who feels people "are yearning for Americana," got the idea after visiting the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The menu will feature such items as apple pie and Southern fried chicken. And maybe even Orange Crush.

USC professor James Durbin discusses Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery". This film accompanies the 1969 Larry Yust adaptation of "The Lottery" (and it was shot on the same location site in Fellows or Taft, California). This discussion has spoilers, so watch the short Larry Yust film first. To see the film, go here.

Google Books just made more than 1,860 full issues of Life available, a run from 1936 to 1972. Naturally, the first thing I wanted to see was the October 28, 1946 issue which carried the winner (Basil Wolvlerton) and runner-up in Al Capp's Lena the Hyena contest. I had never previously seen the runner-up, Ralph Boden. Wolverton also appeared in later issues.

Go here to browse all issues. To search for specific subjects, go to Google Advanced Book Search and use commands like "shmoo source:life", "life magazine: shmoo" and "life magazine: Jimmie Fidler".

In the first "Life Itself" (a phrase created by novelist Elaine Dundy) we covered the ten million photos in Google's Life photo archive and Dagmar in the July 16, 1951 issue. My guess of "ten or less" photos of Dagmar in that issue was way off. Counting the cover, I see 20 photos. Click "life" below to see "Life Itself" #1.

At last a color scan of the cover art I did for Xero 9, previously seen here in black and white. Click to enlarge. The cover is posted here to as a correction and clarification, since it was reprinted in The Best of Xero (Tachyon, 2004) with a caption crediting another artist. It was created by dripping rubber cement on an illustration board, letting it dry, covering it with India ink, pulling up the rubber cement, drawing in the white areas (with a bit of Wally Wood influence evident) and smoothing on some Zip-a-tone. Then it was printed on red dayglo paper. Apparently I had some notion of integrating the Xero logo with the art.

The world was warm and white when I was born:Beyond the windowpane the world was white,A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light,Although the whiteness was almond and was boneIn midnight's still paralysis, neverthelessThe world was warm and hope was infiniteAll things would come, fulfilled, all things would be knownAll things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, and come to be my own.--Delmore Schwartz

Among the fanzines I saw during the early 1950s, the drawings of Dave English always amused and impressed. Somewhere miles beyond the Saul Steinberg horizon, the lower-case signature "de" heralded fluid free associations and twisting, overlapping lines etched into ink-splattered mimeograph stencils spilling from cosmic trash barrels in the back alleys of the brain. Today, on the Internet, one can see a few, very few, of his drawings. Dig deeper, and you can find fiction written in English by English, a story titled "the little boy who bit people" (originally published in Charles Wells' Fiendetta).Decades danced by before I finally met Dave English, and when I did, it was in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. A week later, they were selling T-shirts around Boston that read, "I survived the Blizzard of '78."

I had moved from Cambridge and was living in Somerville then. Someone at the Somerville public access television station pushed a camera to their studio window, better to capture snow flurries in the street below. To do a film review for Cambridge's alternative weekly, The Real Paper, I had to get through the snowfall to a screening of animated films scheduled for a showing at Harvard's Carpenter Center auditorium. The screening, however, was not at the Carpenter Center.

Instead, I traveled from Somerville's Lechmere station to the University Film Studies Center at MIT. Located at 18 Vassar Street, the Film Studies office was in MIT's historic, cavernous Building 20, a three-story, shingle-clad wooden barracks built in 1943 as a major site for radar research. It was a temporary structure, intended to be torn down after World War II, but for 55 years it housed a variety of labs, student clubs and academic departments until it finally was demolished in 1998.

Also in Building 20 was the Tech Model Railroad Club where members in 1959 wrote the early computer programs that set in motion the hacker dream and the personal computer revolution. See the opening chapters of Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984). Only two other journalists made it to the Film Studies screening. While the animated shorts unspooled, the wind began rattling a window. Someone entered the darkened room, and over the whir of the 16mm projector, I heard his odd, muttered warning as he left, "It's really coming down out there."

When I walked outside, I was stunned by the amount of snow piling up in white dunes. Trekking back to a snowbound Somerville wasn't a pleasant prospect. Better to simply go one subway stop into Boston, since I had a key to a friend's Beacon Hill apartment. Entering the Kendall station, I rode to Charles Street, where the streetlamps illuminated swirling clouds, sparkling like diamond dust in the twilight.

I walked two blocks on Charles through the gathering snowstorm, decided to get something to eat and went into a salad bar. Inside was a single customer. From plays I had seen, I recognized him as the Boston actor-mime Bill Barnum, who had given a memorable performance as Renfield in a local production of Dracula. ("Flies? Flies? Poor puny things! Who wants to eat flies? Not when I can get nice fat spiders.") Outside, snowdrifts began to bank against the front window. I said, "Bill, this is beginning to look like a genuine blizzard, so why are you hanging out here in a salad bar?"

His answer: "Oh, I was supposed to get together with Dave English. He should be here soon." When he gave this startling response, I decided I was in no hurry to leave. Some years earlier, the theater critic Larry Stark had told me that English lived in Boston and worked as a dishwasher in restaurants around the city, so I knew this was certain to be not just any Dave English but the Dave English. (Larry published A David English Sketchbook in 1958.)

"I'd like to meet him, Bill. Could you introduce me?"

"Oh, sure."

Ten minutes later, the door opened, gusts blew in, and so did Dave English, frost flying from his cap. He took a seat between Barnum and myself, settling in with an eager smile as I began sounding off, praising his fanzine drawings of the 1950s. When I was in high school in the early 1950s, I had assumed from the sophistication of his sketches that he was older, so I was surprised to learn that we were about the same age. As we discussed various fanzines, artists and writers, Barnum eventually fell silent, gave us a curious stare and asked, "Do you two know each other?"

Harry Stephen KeelerI remember English talking enthusiastically about his favorite novelist, the pulp writer Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), who had edited America's Humor during the 1920s and also edited 10 Story Book from 1919 to 1940. Keeler was ranked by William Poundstone as "one of the strangest writers who ever lived." An apt description, perhaps, when one encounters a pre-Dickian detour by Keeler in a passage such as this from his X. Jones -- of Scotland Yard (1936):

So, Jones says, for all practical purposes, in a world of space and "time," the "wrinkles" resulting from the "crime-stress" appear, in reality, as "deviations." Deviations in human conduct: deviations from normal habit, custom, and be likened to an explosion, or concussion, the force of which radiates out in all directions--not just into the future, he cautions--but also into the past!--definitely deviating the paths and conduct not only of the chief actors--but of all those who have intimate contact with them--and who, by that very relationship, are thus displaced in 4 dimensions from the chief actors. The maximum possible "deviation" in a murder is, Jones points out, that of the murdered man--whose course is deviated, for the first time, from living to being dead!

Keeler outlined his working methods for that kind of convoluted writing in his article "The Mechanics and Kinematics of Web Work Plot Construction" for The Author & Journalist. According to Larry Stark, Dave English also enjoyed reading Lovecraft, Samuel Delaney and Henry James. But I only recall him urging me to read Keeler, whom I had never heard of back in 1978. Today, the "Keeler Renaissance" gathers steam with websites and occasional mentions of Keeler's influence on Futurama and Neil Gaiman. Back issues of Richard Polt's Keeler News can be read online here.

Keeler's novels have been brought back into print by Fender Tucker's Ramble House (which has also published Dick Lupoff's Marblehead: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft). Keeler's reputation continues to escalate. At this rate, he may some day fill the gap left when Richard Yates became too famous to still be called the best-known "least-known" writer. Larry Stark, however, finds the notion of a "Keeler Renaissance" so preposterous that he laughed uproariously for a full minute when I mentioned it to him.At some point, I asked English where he was living. He answered, "I live beneath a North End theater in an upholstered chair accessible only by using wooden planks to avoid stepping in the water surrounding the chair." I may not have the quote exactly right, but it was a vivid image that has stayed with me for years, reminiscent of playwright Alfred Jarry's bizarre living situation, a claustrophobic crib where visitors could not stand because his apartment was only half the height of a floor in the building.

Through the window I could see nothing but pure ivory whiteness as the clock edged toward 9pm. By that time, only two women were still working, cleaning up, and one of them called out, "Okay, fellows, we're closing up now."

When we stood up and stepped outside, ready to face the challenge, I was blasted in the face by a spray of frigid flakes. I expected Barnum and English to turn right and head for the Charles St. subway station. Instead, to my amazement, they turned left, which meant that they intended to slog across the Boston Common and then on to the North End, a staggering journey not unlike the perils faced by Scott of the Antarctic. I watched them walk away -- spectral ghosty men vanishing as they faded to white. Then, following the route of the ducklings in Make Way for Ducklings, I headed up the hill, a mini-Everest that would have left Robert McCloskey's ducklings sprawled on the sidewalk with ice-covered beaks.

A silent snow, secret snow fell while I dreamed in the darkness, and when I woke, the world had changed. I set out to meet some friends at the Hampshire House restaurant above the Bull & Finch Pub (the real-life Cheers bar) but had to circumnavigate a corner where the snow had drifted to a second-story height. With all vehicular traffic banned for a week, cross-country skiers left tracks on abandoned highways. Crowds of college students walked in groups through the middle of surreal Siberian streets.

I wrote the film review and somehow managed to get it to The Real Paper office in Cambridge. In Harvard Square so much snow was impacted over a narrow path between two buildings that walking the path actually brought one to a rooftop level. Some days later, a filmmaker phoned to congratulate me, pointing out that I was the only Boston film critic to get a review into print that week.

Dave English and I had exchanged mailing addresses, but I never saw him again. Where is he now? I don't know. Almost 40 years ago, English wrote chapters of his novel, The World Does Not Change (1970), which may or may not be influenced by Keeler. Sounds just like the kind of thing Fender Tucker might want to publish. So if Tucker can locate English and English completed The World Does Not Change, there's our happy ending. Meanwhile, I prefer to remember the Dave English who created mimeo magic with those dancing drawings of long ago. They drift softly through my memories. Where are the twilltone snows of yesteryear?

Cliff Sterrett began Polly and Her Pals in 1912 as Positive Polly. It ran in Hearst papers as both a daily strip and a Sunday strip. The onset of arthritis led him to bring in Paul Fung and Vernon Greene as assistants on the dailies. Sterrett needed a full page to display his innovative visuals, verging on cubism, but after WWII, his masterpiece no longer had a full page, and it came to an end on Sunday, June 15, 1958, as newspapers continued to downsize the comics. As Michael Moore puts it, newspapers "slit their own throats."

In 1976 someone told me they had just purchased a 16mm reel of Soundies musical shorts from the 1940s. When we looked at the reel the next day, I was struck by the dynamic performance of the boogie-woogie pianist Maurice Rocco, someone I had never heard of or read about. A week or so later, I was reading Variety and saw the obituary for Rocco. On the day I learned of his existence by watching the film, Rocco was murdered in Thailand where he lived and performed.

I wanted to learn more about Rocco. On one of her Piano Jazz shows, Marian McPartland had Paul Shaffer as a guest, and she asked him if he knew of Maurice Rocco. Surprisingly, Shaffer said, "No," so whatever she was about to say about Rocco went unsaid.

Finally, at the Museum of Television & Radio (now renamed as the Paley Center for Media), I typed Rocco's name into one of their computers and struck gold, a TV guest appearance in which Rocco not only played boogie-woogie standing up, he moved the piano around, spinning it about the stage while he played it. In 1948, he appeared with Milton Berle on the Texaco Star Theater, and he was a semi-regular on the Dumont Network's Cavalcade of Stars (1949-1952).

Which raises the question: Did Jerry Lee Lewis see Rocco on TV and get a few ideas?

Rocco on jazz and swing: "Jazz, and that's what we're talking about when you mention swing, is just a matter of personal opinion. It depends on the guy in the audience and how he responds. Now Duke Ellington - his music is so distinctive that everyone accepts it as jazz, which it always is. Jazz is music with feeling, and if the listener has that same feeling, he calls it jazz."

Rocco performed in several films. In 1937, he was seen in 52nd Street and Vogues of 1938 (above clip). In 1945, he appeared in Duffy's Tavern and Incendiary Blonde. Born Maurice Rockhold in Oxford, Ohio, he studied at Oxford's Miami University. After performing on Cincinnati radio stations, he worked with Noble Sissle and Duke Ellington, changed his name and launched his own group, Maurice Rocco and his Rockin' Rhythm Boys, playing in New York and Chicago night clubs, theaters and radio.

Tyler Stout has created a striking series of posters for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Austin, Texas) in limited editions. The one above is sold out, but others can be purchased here.

Two films were based on the novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell (writing as Don A. Stuart): The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Thing (1982). The story was first published in the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combated the musty smell of sweat-and-snow-drenched furs. The acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air.

Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their associates - dogs, machines and cooking - came another taint. It was a queer, neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of industry and life. And it was a life-smell. But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically onto the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the unshielded glare of the electric light.

Blair, the little bald-pated biologist of the expedition, twitched nervously at the wrappings, exposing clear, dark ice beneath and then pulling the tarpaulin back into place restlessly. His little birdlike motions of suppressed eagerness danced his shadow across the fringe of dingy gray underwear hanging from the low ceiling, the equatorial fringe of stiff, graying hair around his naked skull a comical halo about the shadow's head.

Commander Garry brushed aside the lax legs of a suit of underwear, and stepped toward the table. Slowly his eyes traced around the rings of men sardined into the Administration Building. His tall, stiff body straightened finally, and he nodded. "Thirty-seven. All here." His voice was low, yet carried the clear authority of the commander by nature, as well as by title.

"You know the outline of the story back of that find of the Secondary Pole Expedition. I have been conferring with second-in-Command McReady, and Norris, as well as Blair and Dr. Copper. There is a difference of opinion, and because it involves the entire group, it is only just that the entire Expedition personnel act on it.

"I am going to ask McReady to give you the details of the story, because each of you has been too busy with his own work to follow closely the endeavors of the others. McReady?"

Moving from the smoke-blued background, McReady was a figure from some forgotten myth, a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked. Six-feet-four inches he stood as he halted beside the table, and, with a characteristic glance upward to assure himself of room under the lower ceiling beam, straightened. His rough, clashingly orange windproof jacket he still had on, yet on his huge frame it did not seem misplaced. Even here, four feet beneath the drift-wind that droned across the Antarctic waste above the ceiling, the cold of the frozen continent leaked in, and gave meaning to the harshness of the man. And he was bronze – his great red-bronze beard, the heavy hair that matched it. The gnarled, corded hands gripping, relaxing, gripping relaxing on the table planks were bronze. Even the deep-sunken eyes beneath heavy brows were bronzed.

Age-resisting endurance of the metal spoke in the cragged heavy outlines of his face, and the mellow tones of the heavy voice. "Norris and Blair agree on one thing, that animal we found was not-terrestrial in origin. Norris fears there may be danger in that; Blair says there is none.

"But I'll go back to how, and why, we found it. To all that was known before we came here, it appeared that this point was exactly over the South Magnetic Pole of Earth. The compass does point straight down here, as you all know. The more delicate instruments of the physicists, instruments especially designed for this expedition and its study of the magnetic pole, detected a secondary effect, a secondary, less powerful magnetic influence about 80 miles southwest of here.

"The Secondary Magnetic Expedition went out to investigate it. There is no need for details. We found it, but it was not the huge meteorite or magnetic mountain Norris had expected to find. Iron ore is magnetic, of course; iron more so - and certain special steels even more magnetic from the surface indications, the secondary pole we found was small, so small that the magnetic effect it had was preposterous. No magnetic material conceivable could have that effect. Soundings through the ice indicated it was within one hundred feet of the glacier surface.

"I think you should know the structure of the place. There is a broad plateau, a level sweep that runs more than 150 miles due south from the Secondary station, Van Wall says. He didn't have time or fuel to fly farther, but it was running smoothly due south then. Right there, where that buried thing was, there is an ice-drowned mountain ridge, a granite wall of unshakable strength that has damned back the ice creeping from the south.

"And four hundred miles due south is the South Polar Plateau. You have asked me at various times why it gets warmer here when the wind rises, and most of you know. As a meteorologist I'd have staked my word that no wind could blow at -70 degrees - that no more than a 5-mile wind could blow at -50 - without causing warming due to friction with ground, snow and ice and the air itself.

"We camped there on the lip of that ice-drowned mountain range for twelve days. We dug out camp into the blue ice that formed the surface, and escaped most of it. But for twelve consecutive days the wind blew at 45 miles an hour. It went as high as 48, and fell to 41 at times. The temperature was -63 degrees. It rose to -60 and fell to -68. It was meteorologically impossible, and it went on uninterruptedly for twelve days and twelve nights.

"Somewhere to the south, the frozen air of South Polar Plateau slides down from that 18,000-foot bowl, down a mountain pass, over a glacier, and starts north. There must be a funneling mountain chain that directs it, and sweeps it away for four hundred miles to hit that bald plateau where we found the secondary pole, and 350 miles farther north reaches the Antarctic Ocean.

"It's been frozen there since Antarctica froze twenty million years ago. There never has been a thaw there.

"Twenty million years ago Antarctica was beginning to freeze. We've investigated, thought and built speculations. What we believe happened was about like this.

"Something came down out of space, a ship. We saw it there in the blue ice, a thing like a submarine without a conning tower or directive vanes. 280 feet long and 45 feet in diameter at its thickest.

Daphne du Maurier wrote "The Birds" in 1952, and it was adapted for the Lux Radio Theatre on July 20, 1953. Listen to it here. (This is recorded from the Armed Forces Radio Network which changed the name of the Lux series to Hollywood Radio Theatre.)

What happened at 3am on August 18, 1961, inspired Alfred Hitchcock to film The Birds. Tens of thousands of crazed seabirds invaded Monterey Bay's northern shore, crashing wildly into doors, windows and people who ran from their houses. In Capitola and Rio Del Mar the streets were littered with carcasses of the dark, gull-like sooty shearwaters. Eight people were bitten.

The birds became disoriented by domoic acid after eating plankton bloom, a large school of anchovies. "There were birds hanging off of lampposts, running into police cars, being chased by cats," said biologist David Garrison. The air was filled with the stench of disgorged anchovies. One newspaper story said the sooty shearwaters were "wailing and crying like babies," biting people, crashing into streetlights and vomiting up anchovies.

Hitchcock lived in the area and read the Santa Cruz Sentinel account. He began collecting all newspaper stories of the incident, checked on the film rights to Daphne du Maurier's story "The Birds" (which he had previously optioned) and soon brought in Evan Hunter to write the screenplay for The Birds. But surely he had heard the 1953 Lux Radio Theater adaptation with Herbert Marshall. It was followed by another radio adaptation on Escape on July 10, 1954.

The Shambala website says it is no longer threatened by the fires. In the interview above, she discusses The Birds,Marnie, Roar and the Shambala Preserve. Curiously, in interviews she always calls The Birds her "first film," even though her own filmography lists The Petty Girl (1950) as her first film. In the labels below, click "hitchcock" to read my two articles (one fairly lengthy) about Hitchcock.

Greenwich emerged as a songwriter when America itself was on the cusp of everything, a whole set of conventions unspooling under the power of rock 'n' roll, the civil rights movement and the incipient counterculture. Her American polyglot upbringing prepared Greenwich, who died today at age 68 of a heart attack, for what she became: one of the great sound alchemists who turned the ambiguities of youth into the essence of American pop.

Able to sing, arrange and produce as well as pen indelible hits, Greenwich found her artistic home within New York's Brill Building, where she, her husband and songwriting partner, Jeff Barry, and their peers transformed an art form without making a big deal of it. She was a natural collaborator who could match wits with control freaks like Phil Spector and totally relate to the kids in the groups who recorded her songs.

She could write silly and she could write serious. But Greenwich's key works -- such classics as "Leader of the Pack," "Chapel of Love" and "River Deep, Mountain High" as well as more obscure ones like "Out in the Streets" and "Girls Can Tell" -- have a particular resonance that goes beyond catchiness or nostalgia.

1963 press photo of the Raindrops with Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Ellie's sister Laura. But now here's the mystery. Answer if you can. If Ellie did all overdubbing as it says in her official biography, then why is Laura in this Rainsdrops photograph? Possibly she lip-synched in performances as per a sentence in the Greig interview? (When Les Paul and Mary Ford performed for audiences, the multi-track sound of their recordings was simulated by having Mary's sister, Carol, sing into an offstage microphone.)